Nero
2018 · 5m · España
Directed by Khalil El Hamdani
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A wave of murders of gas-cylinder delivery men has left the population of Miraflores shocked. A group of journalists interviews Clemente Salcedo, one of them, to find out the possible causes of these crimes, in a mockumentary about the life of a delivery man.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A mockumentary about murdered gas-cylinder delivery men in Peru should be either obvious satire or obvious tragedy—instead Nero commits fully to absurdist reporting, mining genuine dread from the mundane, which is exactly the kind of category-resistant move that makes consensus programmers squirm.
The film's formal rigor lies in its restraint: the mockumentary form could easily collapse into sketch comedy, but El Hamdani maintains journalistic solemnity while the premise itself does the subversive work, a tonal discipline that recalls the deadpan precision of Chris Morris or early HBO documentaries.
The entire architecture hinges on one choice—treating the interviews with Clemente as genuinely sympathetic portraiture while the crimes remain absurdly, unjustifiably horrific—and that single tonal tension, held without winking, elevates what could have been a one-joke premise into something that actually breathes.